Dear Paul

Why I’m breaking up with Paul Ryan.

Will Saletan writes about politics, science, technology, and other stuff for Slate. He’s the author of Bearing Right.

I don’t want to see you anymore.

Two weeks ago, I declared my love for you. I said you would focus the election on fiscal responsibility. I envisioned you leading a movement of young people to control runaway spending.

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My friends said I was crazy. They said you weren’t who I thought you were. Paul Krugman said you were a fake fiscal conservative. Scott Lemieux called you a standard-issue right-winger. Jim Surowiecki compared you to Barry Goldwater. I didn’t believe the naysayers. Sometimes they said you were too extreme. Sometimes they said you were a squishy hypocrite for supporting TARP and the auto bailout. It seemed like they just wanted to make you look bad one way or the other. I thought they were just playing politics.

I tried to stand by you, Paul. I didn’t care that you grabbed federal money for your district. Every congressman does that. I gave you credit, not blame, for supporting TARP. I saw that vote as evidence that you, unlike many of your conservative colleagues, cared more about economic consequences than about making a statement. I winced every time you talked about your hard-line position on abortion, but I told my friends that voting records are misleading, that what a politician chooses to work on is more important, that social issues aren’t your thing, that your real interest is the budget. I even apologized for your dogmatism on climate change. I was willing to believe that you were skeptical of regulation but that you hadn’t really studied the science and that when you did, you’d come around. Jonah Goldberg poked fun at me for sometimes being so open-minded that my brains fall out. And you know what? (Drum roll, please ...) He’s right.

I hate to admit it, but Krugman nailed me on this one. I was looking for Mr. Right—a fact-based, sensible fiscal conservative—and I tried to shoehorn you into that role.

That’s where you let me down, Paul. Since Mitt Romney tapped you as his running mate, you haven’t stood for fiscal restraint. You’ve attacked it. You warned voters in North Carolina and Virginia that cuts in the defense budget would take away their tax-supported jobs. And I cringe when I recall what I said about you and Medicare. “Ryan destroys Romney’s ability to continue making the dishonest, anti-conservative argument that Obamacare is evil because it cuts Medicare,” I wrote. “Now Romney will have to defend the honest conservative argument, which is that Medicare spending should be controlled.”

In short, you adopted every tactic in the liberal playbook. You framed a reduced rate of growth as a draconian cut. You inflated the likely impact of the reduction. You denounced any loss of services as unacceptable. You promised not to touch seniors’ benefits. And you reaffirmed a fiscally unsustainable guarantee. By my count, you’ve now done this in at least six speeches and rallies. Every day, you’re reinforcing the culture of entitlement and making it harder to rein in retirement programs.

You even embraced the delusion that government is a threat to Medicare, when in fact government is the funder of Medicare. This misconception used to be a joke, an illustration of popular ignorance. But now you’re peddling it. “Mitt Romney and I are going to stop that raid on Medicare,” you told voters in New Hampshire a week ago. “We're going to restore this program, and we'll get these bureaucrats out of the way of standing between our senior citizens and their Medicare.”

I still see promise in you, Paul. I love it when you challenge the rhetoric of public “investment.” I admire your fixation on the Grim Reaper of debt. I’m sympathetic to your argument that student loans and insurance subsidies distort markets. I swoon when you crusade against the generational greed and fiscally hollow promises of the entitlement state. But if you won’t stand by your principles when it counts, Paul—if you’re just going to demagogue Medicare like an old-style liberal—then you’re useless to this country. I want my love letter back.